Winners announced for student art contest

The entries in Foodshare's "Student Voices Agains Hunger" art contest have been hanging in the concourse between the State Capitol and the Legislative Office Building for the last few weeks.  This contest is one of Foodshare's Hunger Action Month activities and last evening, we were thrilled to invite the finalists to an event at the State Capitol and present awards to our winners.

 

This year’s theme was “Hunger may be sitting next to you”. It illustrates the quiet reality of more than 50,000 children in our region who face hunger and are missing meals. Kids who live in struggling families may never tell anyone that they are hungry, so this year’s students raised their voices to bring attention to this sad reality.

 

The idea for this year’s theme came from real life. A local chef told us that as a youngster he sat next to a girl in school for years and never had a clue she had been hungry until she wrote him a letter after seeing him on a cooking show. It made us wonder how often that happens, hungry kids hiding in plain site. Unfortunately there is still a stigma associated with poverty and hunger, causing people to feel shame rather than reaching out for help.

As I said at last night's awards ceremony, "Foodshare is building a movement of hunger activists determined to address the root causes of hunger.  Through our education and outreach programs we hope to develop a generation that will not tolerate hunger. "

Here's one sample of the artwork and you can see the individual winners art as follows:

• Art
• Writing
• Video